Sumana read an earlier draft of this entry and asked for an introduction to Duchamp for those who don't know anything about his work. This is problematic because as far as I know all such introductions are based on a very old but apparently incorrect narrative about Duchamp. They all talk about his proto-dadaist use of chance in the creation of art, and his technique of selecting a particular mass-produced object from its brothers and designating it as a 'readymade' work of art. A typical introduction is Wikipedia's.

Voici la chose: Shearer's and (to a lesser extent) Gould's work on the topic show pretty convincingly that this narrative is wrong. (See 12).
Duchamp seems to have been engaged in an experiment to see how far he could go outside this narrative about himself and still convince the art world of its validity. Because the narrative is so old, because so many other artists' work builds on the Duchamp narrative, and because any new narrative would have to be a meta-narrative where Duchamp's greatest work was an elaborate prank designed to misrepresent posterity as to the nature of his art, I don't know what the new narrative would be!

Museums don't seem to know either, because they stick to the old narrative. What's the deal, art museums? You know the guy doctored photos. The Tate put up an original 'readymade' photo of a blank book, noting that the pages were blank. Right next to it they showed how Duchamp doctored the photo to make it look like a geometry book--and referred to it as a 'readymade' geometry book! Is it such an easy narrative to use that you don't notice it doesn't hold up? Or are you in on the joke?

Things of lesser importance: I don't generally think it's really important to look at the originals of paintings instead of pictures of them, but maybe I'm changing my mind. I saw some Edward Hoppers at the Whitney and the colors were very different from any reproduction I'd ever seen. I kind of thought Edward Hopper was a hack but those colors changed my mind. And until I saw the original Nude Descending a Staircase today I always thought it was a spiral staircase. See it in person and it's obviously a regular staircase.

In addition to being in thrall, the museum descriptions were somewhat fanciful. NDaS caused scandal at the Armory show "partly because no one had previously thought of a 'nude' doing something as prosaic as coming down stairs." Gimme a break. Nudes are always lounging around doing nothing, which is more prosaic still.